Service stations to reduce trading?

Press, 19 August 1981, Page 3

Service stations to reduce trading?

PA Wellington Service station owners are threatening to restrict petrol supplies if the Marsden Point refinery dispute is not settled.

The director of the Motor Trade Association. Mr Max Barclay, said last evening that it would ask the Minister of Energy (Mr Birch) to endorse the plan to trade only between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. from August 25.

Mr Barclay said the association had decided to recommend the hours to protect employment in the industry and to help conserve fuel.

He said - August 25 had been chosen as the starting date because indications were the supply of petrol would dwindle rapidly from then. The Minister of Labour (Mr Bolger) and the president of the Federation of Labour (Mr W. J.,Knox) are expected to meet today to try to settle the dispute and avert a return to petrol rationing. The prospect of the meeting caused the Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) yesterday to delay referring the dispute — which is based on refinery operators' hourly pay rates — to the Arbitration Court. The dispute could be referred to the court under a provision of the Commerce Act which allows the court to order a return to work while a settlement is decided. Mr Muldoon said the Marsden dispute was ideally suited to that provision. He said the threat to use the act “just underlined the fact" that the Government could not permit supplies of petrol to be cut off. The refinery has now been shut for tw’o weeks.

Seventeen days petrol supply remains throughout New Zealand, according to the Government, two days off what it regards as the,ls-day stockpile minimum.